My Friends

Civilization V: Trials and Tribulations

Why is this game so good, and yet so flawed?

So as anyone who plays PC and/or strategy genre games knows by now, Civ V is out and ready for all of us who have been playing Sid Meier's games since the early 90s. As usual, they have made tweaks and improvements to the core mechanics, kept it totally accessible, and have spruced up the graphics quite a bit to meet the modern standards for PC games. On the plus side, I have to say that the new social policies are fantastic, diplomacy is better (but not quite there yet, I know this one is tough to make it really work so I tend to be more understanding of it) and the units and their upgrades seem a bit better balanced. The hex system feels great and for any who never played the old panzer games you can see why so many other turn based strategy games used it. I've played through three games on various difficulties with three different races on a scale of difficulties and each time felt challenged but that it was fair. So good news, it's a worthwhile improvement over Civ IV and they didn't muck up the underlying excellent game. If you liked Civ IV, it's probably a buy for you...assuming this next bit doesn't turn you off.

What I don't understand is why the game is so pitifully slow and crashed near constantly when trying to used Direct X 10+. I've installed it on three different rigs, all well above and beyond their recommended system specs, and not a single one of these has been able to run the game for more than 30 minutes without crashing gloriously. The game lags down to a near standstill if you make it much farther than that in Direct X 10+, and now with their newest patch it just crashes constantly on events. I have found that if you downgrade it to Direct X 9 the game runs significantly better. The crash bugs and freezes almost fully disappear, but there's still the troubling lag once your game gets to the end stages (think 1750AD+) between turns, and the game has an annoying habit of freezing up and failing to start when you do a new game. Then we get into some of the more questionable infrastructure questions about Civ V. My first thought was, oh man steam again. I don't know about everyone else here, but I avoid letting Steam, Impulse, or other services run in the background whenever possible. Getting past that, hey achievements! Cool! So I completed the game expecting to be able to check out all of these achievements I had earned during that play through and (seeing what an achievement hog I am) plan out my next game. Nope, you can't check them in-game. They are steam achievements, so you have to check them out via your profile on steam out of game. Why achievements aren't available from the main menu of the game is insane in my opinion.

There are plenty more in-game issues like visuals (entire cities!) disappearing mid-game, and other fun things like that. Overall, is it good? Heck it's great. Should any previous Civ fan pick it up? Probably if you're looking for new fun and challenges. Is it a 10? More like a 7 to an 8.5 depending on your threshold for pain. They really shouldn't have left so many bugs in, and some of their omissions just blow my mind. Great job by their art and development teams, but the QA department either was asleep at the wheel or were told where they could take their bug reports somewhere along the line. Of course, if any of you reading this have found ways to remedy some of these problems let me know in the comments below so I can get back to enjoying what should be a great game!

Edit: Pro-tip of sorts. I had one person message me noting that you should basically save and quite every couple of turns in the late game to avoid the massive slowdowns. Been doing this, it helps but is certainly not the solution I'd like to see.